My husband betrayed the wrong woman

Chapter4

"She was the kindest woman I ever knew."

The pastor's voice carried over a graveside crowd that wasn't a crowd at all. Maybe twelve people. Aunt Bea's old neighbor. Two women from her book club. The librarian she'd worked with for thirty years. A few faces I didn't fully recognize but knew from holiday cards.

That was it. That was the whole list of people who had loved her.

I stood at the edge of the open grave in a black dress that was too thin for the cold, and I held a single white rose I had bought at the gas station on the way over because I had forgotten flowers were a thing you were supposed to bring.

The pastor kept talking. I couldn't hear most of it. The wind kept lifting his words away.

I looked down at my hands. They had stopped shaking, finally, after three days. They looked like someone else's hands. Pale. Plain. A wedding ring still on the left one because I had not been able to bring myself to take it off, not yet, not in front of all these people who had known me as a wife.

That was when I heard the heels on the gravel.

I knew the sound before I turned my head. I had heard those heels in my own hallway for three years. I had heard them in my own kitchen four days ago.

Joan was walking up the path in a black dress that fit her too well to be borrowed from grief. Her hair was done. Her makeup was perfect. She had a tissue in her hand that hadn't touched her face yet. Trevor walked beside her in a dark gray suit, one hand on the small of her back like she was the widow and not me.

My whole body went cold.

The pastor faltered for a half second when he saw them, then kept going. The book club ladies turned around. The librarian gave me a long, worried look.

I broke from the graveside. I crossed the wet grass before I'd decided to move.

"What are you doing here."

Joan's face did the soft thing. The hurt thing. The one she'd been doing since we were nine.

"Stevie. She was my aunt too. Remember?"

"You haven't called her aunt in fifteen years."

"That doesn't change what she was to me."

"You didn't visit her. Not once. Not in three months. She was in that hospital for ninety-two days, Joan. I counted. You never came."

"I didn't come because Aunt Bea had her favorites and I wasn't on the list." Her voice stayed soft. The kind of soft that's actually sharp. "She loved you. She tolerated me. She made that very clear my whole life. I'm not here for her. I'm here to pay my respects, and there's nothing you can do about that."

"There's everything I can do about it. Get out."

"Stevie."

"Get out of my aunt's funeral, Joan. Right now."

I stepped sideways to block her path. My heels sank into the soft ground. She stopped walking but she didn't step back, and her eyes had gone flat in the way they always did right before she made me look like the crazy one.

Trevor's hand left her back. He moved between us.

"Stevie. Stop."

"Don't."

"You are seriously going to do this. At a funeral. In front of all these people."

"She doesn't belong here."

"She is your cousin. She lost the same aunt you did. Look at her, she's shaking."

Joan was, in fact, shaking. A little. On cue.

"Are you really this low?" Trevor said. His voice was quiet but it carried. The book club ladies had stopped pretending not to listen. "Are you really going to cause a scene at your own aunt's grave because you can't stand seeing me with someone else? This is who you are now?"

The words I wanted to say lined up in my throat like soldiers. I opened my mouth.

I closed it.

Behind Trevor, just visible over his shoulder, Aunt Bea's casket sat with the lid still open at the top, white satin showing. The pastor was watching me. The librarian was watching me. The neighbor was watching me.

Aunt Bea had hated scenes. She had hated raised voices and dramatic women and any kind of fuss in public. Stevie, baby, never give them the show. They came for the show. Don't give it to them.

I closed my eyes.

I stepped aside.

"Pay your respects, then," I said. My voice came out flat. "And then leave."

Joan walked past me. As she passed she lifted the tissue to her eye like she was wiping away something that wasn't there. She made a small sound in her throat, the kind of small choked sound that a woman makes when she's been holding it in for too long.

She had not been holding anything in.

She took her place near the front, between the librarian and Aunt Bea's old neighbor. Both of them shifted away from her without meaning to. She didn't seem to notice. She bowed her head. She pressed the tissue to her cheek. She started to cry, very softly, very prettily, with her shoulders just barely shaking.

Trevor stayed at the back. He didn't look at me. He looked at her.

The pastor cleared his throat and kept reading.

I walked back to the graveside on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. I stood where I had been standing. I held my rose. I did not cry. Crying would have given them something.

That was when I felt it.

The feeling of being watched.

It was so specific. Not a feeling of being looked at, the way you get in a crowd. The feeling of being watched. The way a deer feels watched right before it bolts.

I lifted my head.

A man was standing about thirty yards away, near a tall oak at the edge of the cemetery. Not part of the funeral. Not part of any funeral, as far as I could tell. He was alone. He wore a long black coat that looked expensive even from this far away, and his hands were in his pockets, and he was looking at me.

Not at the grave. Not at the pastor.

At me.

He didn't look away when our eyes met. He didn't pretend to be doing something else. He just held my gaze, calm, like he had been waiting for me to notice him.

He was too far for me to see his face clearly. But something about the shape of him, the way he stood, made my stomach do something cold and slow.

I had never seen this man before in my life.

I was sure of it.

So why did I feel like he knew me?

"Mrs. Reed?"

I jumped. The pastor was talking to me. The little crowd was waiting. They all had small handfuls of dirt in their hands. I had missed my cue.

I bent down. I scooped up the cold dirt with my free hand. I stood. I let it fall onto the casket. The sound it made when it hit was the worst sound I had ever heard in my life.

I dropped the rose in after it.

"Goodbye, Aunt Bea," I whispered.

The crowd started to move. Hugs. Quiet I'm so sorrys. The librarian held my hand for a long time and told me my aunt had loved me more than anything. The neighbor pressed a casserole dish into my hands without explaining how I was supposed to eat a casserole from a motel room with no microwave.

Joan came past me on her way to the parking lot. She had stopped crying. The tissue was tucked into her sleeve, dry. She didn't say anything to me. She didn't have to. The look she gave me said everything. I won.

Trevor followed her. He didn't look at me at all.

I watched them get into his car. I watched him open her door for her. I watched her settle into the passenger seat the way I used to settle into it on the way to dinners with his parents.

The car pulled away.

I kept glancing toward the oak tree.

He was still there. He was still watching.

The rest of the crowd thinned. People started walking back to their cars. Someone I half remembered from a Christmas party years ago patted my shoulder and told me to call if I needed anything.

I nodded and said thank you. I waited until they were gone.

Then I walked toward the tree.

I don't know why. I should have walked the other way. He didn't move as I got closer.

He let me come to him.

Up close, he was younger than I'd thought. Maybe early thirties. Dark hair. A jaw that looked carved out of something harder than skin. His eyes were the kind of color that didn't have a real name. Not brown. Not green. Something in between that changed depending on where you were standing.

He was the most striking man I had ever seen, and that was the second thing I noticed.

The first thing I noticed was that he looked at me like he already knew the answer to every question I might ask.

"Did you know my aunt?" I said.

"No."

"Then why are you here?"

He didn't answer right away. He just looked at me for a long second, like he was filing the shape of my face away somewhere he meant to keep it.

"I'm sorry for your loss, Mrs. Reed."

"How do you know my name?"

"It was in the obituary."

It had been. I'd written it myself.

"You haven't told me yours," I said.

"Marco." He paused. "Marco Vance."

The name didn't mean anything to me at the time. I would learn what it meant later. All I knew was that he had come to my aunt's funeral for a reason he wasn't going to tell me yet, and that I had felt it the second he started watching.

"Why are you here, Mr. Vance?"

"To make sure you got home safely."

"From a funeral? You don't even know me."

"No," he said quietly. "I don't."

Then he did the strangest thing.

He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and he took out a small white card. Cream colored. Heavy. The kind of card that didn't need decoration to feel expensive. He held it out to me between two fingers.

I took it. I looked at it.

One name. One phone number. Nothing else.

"If anything happens," he said. "Anything that feels wrong. Anything at all. You call that number. Day or night."

"What is going to happen?"

"Probably nothing." He almost smiled. It wasn't a real smile. "But probably isn't the same as nothing."

I opened my mouth to ask him another fifty questions and he was already walking away.

"Mr. Vance—"

He didn't turn around.

I looked down at the card again.

Then I looked back up.

He was gone.